Matthew McConaughey ditches the six-pack to get in touch with inner indie star (with video)

Dallas Buyers Club hits TIFF

A few years ago, Matthew McConaughey decided that he wanted to make movies that scared him.

He was a buff leading man who typically played characters who won the leading lady — usually after taking his shirt off — in romantic comedies such as How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days or Failure to Launch. Suddenly, he was playing a shady attorney (The Lincoln Lawyer), an evil and homicidal cop (Killer Joe), a male stripper with big dreams (Magic Mike), a desperate fugitive living in the Arkansas woods seeking his first love (Mud). He was still taking his shirt off, but it was for a higher cause.

“I want to pick some things out that scare me a little bit,” McConaughey said at the Toronto International Film Festival over the weekend. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but boy, I can’t get it off my mind.

“But the other thing is, I’m going for more experiences. My choice-making paradigm has more value in my choices right now: what’s the experience going to be for me? What kind of experience am I going to have?”

The latest experience for this buff Texan with the big smile — don’t be put off by the “choice-making paradigm” talk, as McConaughey studied to be a lawyer before he turned to acting — is an unusual one. In the low-budget indie film Dallas Buyers Club, McConaughey plays a real life character, Ron Woodroof, a rodeo cowboy and electrician who discovered in 1985 that he had AIDS and had only a month to live.

Woodroof, who started as a homophobic, hard-drinking ladies’ man, went on to become a pioneer in alternative treatments. He was straight, but he became a saviour to many in the gay community by providing non-approved drugs and supplements that helped slow the disease.

Dallas Buyers Club took more than 20 years to get to the screen. The script bounced around among various producers — at one stage, it was to be a big-budget project starring Brad Pitt, or Ryan Gosling — before it was given to Quebec filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallee. He shot it in natural light with hand-held cameras over 25 days at a budget of $4.9 million.

Other name actors came aboard (the movie co-stars Jared Leto, returning to movies after a six-year absence, and Jennifer Garner) mostly because of McConaughey, who has become, against all odds, an indie darling.

For one thing, his commitment to the film was total. To play Woodroof, he lost 47 pounds, turning himself into an almost skeletal presence to embody a sick man. The famous McConaughey pecs disappeared, and at TIFF, where Dallas Buyers Club had its premiere, he still looked thin as he sat down with the press to talk about the film. He weighs 175 pounds, down from his usual 182, and he seems rail thin in his Just Keep Livin’ T-shirt (the motto refers to his foundation, which helps boys and girls grow into healthy adults).

The diet wasn’t that difficult for him. “My body knew,” he says. “It got the message that I wasn’t going to feed it any more, and it felt like it was losing weight on its own.”

Moreover, it was in service of a story that engaged him from the time he first read the screenplay.

He kept the script on the top of the pile on his desk because, “I thought it was just an incredible original story. Character-driven story. I thought this guy, what he did: seventh grade education, two-bit cowboy, bull-riding electrician hellraising womanizer heterosexual gets HIV. Thirty days to live. And within seven years, he becomes an absolute scientist of HIV … that renegade, that outlaw, who knows as much or more than the doctors did? I thought that was a great story.”

Dallas Buyers Club is set at a time when the AIDS plague was both virulent and misunderstood. Woodroof was straight, but his friends began to doubt that because he had what was thought of as the gay disease.

“Shoot, that suspicion is still there today,” McConaughey says. “I was 16, so I don’t remember it that clearly, but even when Magic Johnson came out with it, there were players who said, ‘I’m not going to play on the same court.’ They had a legitimate beef. Nobody knew.”

Mostly, though, the movie is a character study, and Vallee, who has gone from small coming-of-age movies (C.R.A.Z.Y.) to big-name costume dramas (The Young Victoria), kept it deliberately as unsentimental as possible. Garner, who plays a nurse in the movie, says Vallee cut out scenes that had too much Hollywood emotion to them.

McConaughey says he loved that sensibility.

“We’ve got a similar sense of quality,” he says. “He really understood and loved the anarchy of the story. In other hands, you could take a story about HIV, but you have a guy who consciously becomes a crusader. And we don’t have that third-act change where the violins start and we go into any sentiment. It’s not a message movie. If we follow the guy’s life, the message will come out of that.”